nmcfarl

I don’t know, it might just come down to how good a driver you are.

I agree with the proposition that people are horrible at halfway autonomy.

But I am horrible at driving, and I kind of think almost everybody is. I have a car that just does lane keeping and distance keeping cruise control. The number of times it is notified me that I’m sliding off the side of the road is large. Similarly it’s let off the gas a vast number of times when I was creeping up on the car in front of me and I didn’t notice.

Maybe it’s having just one long, largely empty commute for five years. But I suspect it’s that you can drive any modern car without 100% concentration at which point people are prone to getting distracted.

So I’m thinking the comparison should be halfway autonomy vs a modern “dumb” car and I think halfway autonomy is safer overall.

That’s all reasonable, and everyone is different , but I do think your original comment needed pushback, because meditation is often portrayed as enjoyable and easy at least in certain kinds of media. And I do think a lot of people give up when they find it boring and painful on their first practice.

And for me, it is boring and painful AND useful. And took weeks to start to show any benefits at all. Sort of like going to the gym. And people should know that that is a common thing, that you might hate meditation practice but still find it useful and continue.

I am not a slow reader, but I realized what you did - that these books give me a chance to engage with the topic and if I spend enough time with a subject, I might learn something from myself even if I learn zero from the actual book.

My solution to this problem is to set these books next to one of the two comfy chairs in the house. When I sit in one of these chairs, I consider whether I want to read a chapter, I can only read one chapter, I can only have two of these books going at one time.

And under the system it takes me about three months to finish one of the books up from less than a week. I also find I no longer hate• most of them and I learn a lot more.

• they still have a very high DNF rate.

I really think this depends on the job. As soon as I read your initial comment, I thought about locums in medicine, people who float for as little as a weekend at a time, and as a little as once a quarter at any particular hospital. And the entire hospital industry has been built around them at least in the western United States. They’re clearly contributing something.

I think there are jobs where you need lots of context and there are jobs where other things are more important.

I think i can handle this code by hand in fact it’s better than code I have handled by hand. (at a cursory glance.)

In my day - I think it was around 2000 – I was handed a 5000 line perl script that both responded to CGI bin requests to run a store and kicked off fulfillment of the orders. Inside that script, it had two 1500 line long subroutines that sometimes navigated internally via goto.

We refactored, and added new features while a profitable business ran on top of the code. You don’t get quite the velocity you do on good code, but it’s manageable.

I knew the answer was no - but I was curious, the nearest locker is a 2h10m drive each way. Which is about an hour closer than I thought it would be.

I did do that. And I think that most of the drivers are not local and the comments just made it more likely they would skip on doing what was going to be clearly a difficult delivery.

However, even after my third revision of the notes – to just remove them entirely – deliveries didn’t pick up again, so I don’t know. It’s opaque to me.

What this mainly says to me is that my life is going to get much worse - as Amazon logistics cannot deliver to my house.

I used to be a big user of Amazon prime, but they recently swapped over to logistics for my rural area which has no cell service and huge distances between houses and that apparently means they can’t deliver. They try and packages sit at the local warehouse for a couple of weeks before being sent back to Amazon.

Originally, some drivers would be foolish enough to try to come up here without cell, but by and large, they were unable to find the property- mainly because the house is not visible from the road, even if the mailbox is on the road, and mapping apps do a bad job. So I’m assuming the drivers don’t get paid or in some other way get punished and this means that a bunch of Christmas presents didn’t show up, and we stopped using Amazon entirely.

Since that we’ve already had a problem with one vendor we purchased from directly that tried to send something to us via Amazon logistics, and it got returned to them. This was not mentioned on the webpage, and when we contacted them, they got really angry with us for giving them an “undeliverable address” – they literally did not want to give us a refund. They really didn’t like: It’s deliverable by USPS, UPS, and FedEx as a response. But eventually, we got a refund.

I’m assuming this is going to be my future more and more now.

I don’t think most people can do this 100% of the time. I actually think if you can do this 100% of the time you’re probably a zen master.

I think most people over the age of 25 can do this maybe 80% of the time. And most of them can keep it under control enough that they only look a little dysfunctional, the other 20% of the time. (although I definitely know a few extroverts who don’t look dysfunctional, they look like the life of the party – but that’s them being dysfunctional and stressing out and trying to make everyone love them. That’s their 20%.)

I do ranch work in a place with a lot of iron in the soil. I often have these sand sized grains of dirt in my port. But I had it in a lightning days as well. I just hate ports.

Before MagSafe, this used to kill phones. Now my son has a phone without a port, but it’s not dead.

But cloudflare is also just difficult, I’m on Starlink (because where I am my only other option is Hughes net), and my browser of choice is Safari. No vpn, and only boring ad blockers.

I routinely blocked by Cloudflare from viewing things and occasionally, I am blocked from buying things. Just this weekend, it was $100 worth of athletic wear. I just keep clicking the box and it never lets me complete the purchase. After the 7th or 10th time I go and find another vendor that would actually sell to me. I was more annoyed than usual because the website already had my credit card at this point – but as this article proves there are reasons to block an order even with a credit card.

I liked the apple II, and the TRS 80 as I rather like basic. And then I didn’t hate DOS, and then I actively hated the graphical shell of Windows 3, but could not afford a Macintosh -so suffered through it where I had to, but mainly used DOS. Then I discovered UNIX, and did almost all of my work on a timeshare - in the early 90s!

Then Windows 95 came out and I actively hated it, but did think it was amazingly pretty - somehow this was the impetus for me to get a pc again, which I put Windows NT on. Which was profitable for freelance gigs in college. Soon after that, I dual booted it to Linux and spent most of my time in Slackware.

After that, I graduated and had enough money to buy a second rig, which I installed OS/2 warp on - which was good for side gigs. And I really liked. A lot. But my day job required that I have a Windows NT box to shell into the Solaris servers as we ran. Then I got a better class of employer and the next several let me run a Linux box to connect to our solaris (or Aix) servers.

Next my girlfriend at the time got a PowerBook G4 and installed OS X on it. It was obviously amazing. Windows XP came out, and it was once again so much worse than Windows NT - and crashed so much more - which was odd as it was based on Windows NT. (yes 98 was before this but it was really bad). Anyhow, right about here the Linux box I was running at home, died. And it was obvious that I was not going to buy an XP box, so I bought my first Mac.

And it’s been the same for the last 25 years - every time I look at a Windows box it’s horrible. I pretty much always have a Linux box headless somewhere in the house, and one rented in the cloud, and a Mac for interacting with the world.

And like the parent I actively dislike windows. And that’s interesting because I’ve liked most other operating systems I’ve used in my life, including MS-DOS. Modern windows is uniquely bad.

Or they can blame Apple for delivering a developer experience to those companies that makes those companies not want to play ball.

Not that they likely will, as Apple owns the framing.

You know, sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes it does. And also I’ve been known to forget it overnight and wake up to moldy clothes.

I have a friend who will say things like “I have to go at 3” and get up at 3 on the dot without even looking at her watch/phone. I’m not that guy and I need buzzers, timers, and ambient displays all working together anything done at a time.

I am pretty sure this is not true.

I recall my mother’s family conversing via mail in the early 80’s - and she would write one 10 page letter a month as a reply (max) - that would 3 or 4 mails a year with any particular sibling (and probably 1 phone call - but phone calls to alaska were expensive, and you wouldn’t say all you wanted to).

This is not always a bad thing. The example I always use of why it’s good that Amazon has knock off parts, is a Jacuzzi heating element.

Amazon has them for $30, but has none of the legitimate item which are only sold through a dealer network and dealers charge the OEM price of $285 bucks plus shipping. It’s not quite the same part – cause dealers only sell a larger unit that includes the heater - you can’t buy the actual part number except via a knockoff.

Add to this that the Jacuzzi part - for my model at least - has a reputation of just dying at two years plus one day, while the Chinese parts frequently last 3-5 years.

In the end, you save yourself quite a lot of money, and time by replacing less frequently, by buying the knock off. And where I live, you couldn’t get the knock off otherwise.

The important thing of course is to know that you’re getting a knock off, and have made that choice in intentionally. Your story does suck - and there can be lots of reasons both good and bad to make a knock off.

Also for kids at least, sometimes they really will be happier with less choice. Sometimes kids make bad decisions and limiting choice to good options is helpful.

Additionally the inverse is true. Sometimes kids choices are restrained, and they really would like to do a thing they are not allowed to, and gift cards offered them away to do that. Case in point: my tween figured out that we don’t let him buy in game currency for any the games that we do let him play, however, when a relative gives him a gift card, we let him redeem it, making gift cards incredibly popular gifts.

Sadly not flat and not open. But more far flung repeaters are an option as I have electricity further from the house.

However the TDeck being hard to use makes it unlikely the kid would carry it. And bad UX in general makes it hard on my wife. It was mainly the bad UX and lack of open source (no hacking for me) aspects that put a damper on things for me.

I am so glad that he did this and I did not.

I’d seriously been considering trying meshcore out, as I live on several hundred acres without cell service, and I’d like some means of communicating with my family. So far CB radios have not worked as they are large to carry day-to-day (particularly for the kid). This seemed like a solution - and fun to tinker with. Apparently not.

This is going to be painful for people in a way which I haven’t seen discussed here yet.

A year ago I went on vacation with my family, and the kids wanted to watch Netflix on VRBO‘s TV and so I logged in to my account on the tv. And of course I forgot to log it out when I left - so, predictably, the next people decided they hated my taste and went through and deleted all my likes and dislikes, and rated I swear 100 teen romances. I somehow got my account logged out of that TV, but the account was trashed and unrepairable so I lost about a decades worth of history and started a new one.

Afterwards, I thought I should’ve just cast from the kids iPad. And now that won’t be possible.

My sixth grader has classmates who call 20-year-olds boomers, at least when the 20-year-olds are doing things they don’t like.

It really just means someone I don’t like who’s older than me.

Interestingly, I have yet to find I have the horrible feedback problem people are talking about in this thread with my APP3, but I do in my Honeywell syncs, about 1 day in 3.

And as I wear glasses all hearing protection in the earmuff style block less noise than the APP3 - though I normally wear both.

I’m not sure if that’s true.

The number of times I’ve opened FFmpegs man page must number in the hundreds. I think I’m a pretty good conceptually, but I can’t remember all the flags. IE that –s is frame size, while -fs is file size.

And while that man page does have some examples, these days I tend to ask an LLM (or if it’s going to be simple Google) for an example.

The conclusion is, it is much better until they cut the coating. However, it feels more like plastic than it does like fabric.

I’ve had two cases for this in the last month. Not that I have access to an agentic browser.

* We decided to buy a robot vacuum, again. And we decided on a particular model that yo-yo‘s up and down in price by about $200 every month. We ended up buying it off of Amazon because of camelcamelcamel, but if I could have easily tracked prices and bought elsewhere, I would’ve. And I would’ve considered using an antigenic browser to do that for me – if I could trust them at all. One model number and I know the price I wanna pay, I just don’t want to check a bunch of storefronts everyday

* kids going back to school – and he has a school supply list. He’s up for a new backpack and a new lunchbox, and a bunch of back to school clothes - so those we’ve actually been shopping for all summer. But the wooden ruler, the three sheafs of college rule paper, etc. I don’t wanna shop for. I actually had chatGPT scan the paper list, and then get me either direct links, or links to searches on walmart.com (they are more than an hours drive from us, but they do deliver to my wife’s work). Then I created a cart and had them deliver. ChatGPT solutions were not bad, I only switched one or two items for a version my kid should have versus a version I should buy. In the moment, I probably would have trusted a bot to do this, though retrospectively I’m glad it went the way it did

My stepmom who retired five years ago, did COBOL dev as part of her banking job until 2002ish and then she was full-time management track. In her bank, most of the work had been integrated with Java, and the Java was done by outsourced Indian teams. At the time she retired she felt the Indian teams had been failing for years to meet objectives, and finally management was seeing it. Additionally everybody who knew the COBOL side of things was retiring at the same time as she was and she did not want to know what the system would look like in five years.

To save some googling the Politicians Fallacy is this one:

We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.

This is really possible. I installed Claude code many months ago, and never used it - but may have logged in in at that time. When sonnet 4 was released I tried it again, and started using it with just my API keys (I do not have a paid subscription).

This was once true, I think, but it is no longer true. If you set an API key in your environment, Claude Code will work.

I read a lot, I have 2 e-readers and stacks of paper books, and an iPad Pro.

And it has been at least five years since I read a book on the phone, or iPad, though a couple years ago I read part of a PDF book on the iPad.

I think this stuff is really down to personal preference. And the kind of reading you do and where you do it.

My iPad never leaves home, and as such, it’s always going ahead to head against the e-reader, and losing except in the case of PDFs.

I do occasionally find myself with too much time and in a place with just my phone and not my laptop case (which almost always has e-reader in it, along with my laptop), and in those cases, I generally read hacker news.

Paper books get read when I cannot find an electronic version - which is fine, better than any other form except the e-reader.

But that’s me and my devices and my usage patterns and hangups. It’s not my wife, It’s not my kid, and it’s probably not most of you.